


Night at the Circus

by Lorindel



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: An Unexpected Journey, Circus, F/M, mawkish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-28
Updated: 2014-11-28
Packaged: 2018-02-27 08:06:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2685419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorindel/pseuds/Lorindel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post Death in Heaven. Clara receives a mysterious invitation to a more mysterious circus. As always, PWP style :) Enjoy!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night at the Circus

**Author's Note:**

> The Doctor and his peers don't belong to me (on behalf of them, thanks god!).

The evening was over. The scene had been deserted as soon as the winners had claimed their bounty, and the fir trees, slowly slipping into the incoming dark, were dangling their branches in the same rhythm as the children's bells, feebly chiming at the rear of the coaches. They were themselves prepared to leave the clearing; the drivers were tutting their horses; people were congregated, like flakes of a premature snow, on the back benches. Silent faces were leaning towards the still-standing marquee. There was a wonder in the glaring eyes that instilled reverence. 

It had been a momentous soiree, had you taken the pain to ask every visitor that had come from far-off helmets and smog-invaded cities. The stunts were fabulous, and never had the acrobats been more deft in their shenanigans. The clown performances were well-played, in a tragicomic blend that suited well the general melancholic tone. But the highlight was certainly the Doctor and his magical blue box. The children loved him, albeit his gruff voice and aggressive accent. They loved to see him appear and disappear, then asked a member of the audience to come over and enter into his world of fantasies. The thrill resides in the befuddling ambiguity of truth and reality: the one who returned was not the one who departed; yet nobody could have told what had changed, if the light was tricking them into thinking the eyes were brightened up, the gait alleviated, and the wrinkles flattened (for the rare adults that dared to face the ridicule of the limelight). 

The Doctor, with a sleight of hand, operated miracles that were not perceived, save by the souls of those still engrossed with their own childhood; still fretting about gold rings and peanut homonculus. The ones that were willing to whisk away their present, and embrace the unnerving past.

The one like that girl, walking with poise and decision, trailed by silence and sprinkles of a languishing fire, still ablaze in the oppressing obscurity like a torch in battle, inclining at the highest peak of the fort its obliging visage, saying, with a tiny voice, that the night was not ended and that dawn was near. 

She had played out her last card, and hold her heart within her hands. When she had understood the irretrievability of her old, familiar being, she had trammelled under her feet, in the rampage of loss and mourning, the well-known figures, the death with her scythe, the lover, sad and consumed, a wistful smile on his lips of Arlequin. 

When she had grabbed the true meaning of the inflating clouds above her head, and enough pressed the grapes of her sourness; 

When she had ceased to retaliate to the shadows on her walls, and smoked their warnings till she suffocated;

When she jolted down her memories into the vast and incomprehensible abyss of broken enchantments, she had raised her glass to the past, and set into motion the weariness that lingered.

Pale but stubborn of an enduring pain, she wanted to kick off the ancient for the new. Coincidently, a poster had fluttered in her room at this moment to smoothly land on the rub. A cerrulean blue, evoking salted drinks and countryside moats and avoided coffee; that finally spilled over her dress; tears retained for a long time; tampering with her own grief. 

Swapping her sadness with the stopgap of hope, she jotted down the hour and place, and prepared for the rendezvous. She had no need to underline her precocious maturity; it was spelled out on her face like a triumphant drunkenness; the one that leaves you in the morning with the guilty joy of having misbehaved.

So she had fumbled in her wardrobes; eventually came out with a probing dress and tingles aplenty. That was the outfit she flaunted on board of the Orient Express, that had fuelled their mutual desires, immediately extinguished by duty (for her) and urgency (for him): the dead do not wait, especially if the living are still pestered by split hearts, traumas, and mummies. 

And now, she was walking in a direction she hoped would not be too sensible. She had ushered her dread to the portal of her miscarried hopes, and double-locked the door behind it. She had listened to its tucking for a while; then stepped outside. The memory cenotaph was incarcerated in a palace that would hold it in secrecy. 

Disclosing herself from the heavy coat, she knocked at the magic blue urn that enclosed the man who had shouted humbug then jettisoned into the wind his silly oaths. The man she loved and the child she in all goodwill could not punish; for his errands were motivated by his wish to please; by his desire of universal equipoise. Despite her misgivings, he had mustered her last resources and queasy guts, before tearing them to pieces. He had showed her the meaning of disorder, of tantrums that were endlessly doomed to repetition; and she accepted his lethalness, because that meant both of them were still alive, if askew. 

And now she was thumping at his door, akin to one of his two hearts. And she knew he could not do otherwise than straighten up his back and make a stand of her unworthiness; defending her despair and pushing her to the ground of their lies. 

The fir trees were shuddering into convulsions. The darting wind was perfunctorily thrusting their thorns, which, abashed and accepting, clattered against each other to lull themselves to sleep. They noticed the creaking of a door, and the warmth that was coming out, infusing their external carapace; they shrivelled their small hands, akin to Clara sinking into the Doctor's steadfast form. 

Now the circus would have an allotted recess: the magician would celebrate the enchantress. Their words, already, manifest the first step to a worship that the end of time itself will define as absolutely viable; even recommended for an out-of-the-grid Time Lord. 

"Have you missed me, Doctor?"

The voice startled him, and for a moment, he thought solitude was getting on his nerves. But there she was, her Clara, unnerved while he was still searching for words that were at the present eluding him; the obnoxious, versatile words: he used to command them once, insofar as he was sure that he could add up that feather to his already glaring cap; the Lord of language: what a proper title it would have been, had she not stumbled into his life! 

He did not know how to answer. Suddenly, he was alien to everything that resembled this small, whirlwinded, tight-shirted person. Sensations, no; they brimmed him with their nonplussed cruelty and reminded him of the fact that he did not take the pain to check on her, after PE's death. 

He fled away, too afraid of what might become, had she lingered with an old man overflowing with young palpitations, and heartbeats like meganovas exploding throughout galaxies; rampaging the nearby planets of his well-grounded restrictions. 

The circus had been an escape that he came up naturally: cowardice was not his strong suit, such was his intolerance vis-a-vis of these arrogant that tried to defy him. They needed a lesson he was too primed to teach them, with a few wriggles of his screwdriver that made them run without one backward glance. For two months, he had amused the sore eyes of adults and a tad less old adults, children that were prematurely grown, and children that had been brought up inconsequentially. For all of them, he had prepared the cure of space, which was, to his books, the best. He had conferred on these disillusioned, scared, or simply unknowing human the dust of billions desiccated stars; the rise of thousands dead suns; the stench of hundreds of cadaveric alien thoughts. They have seen marvels, and came back in the spadework of their life alleviated, without knowing why.

Now, he was disclosed in his lair; the foolish young wizard, the still bow-tied and bouncing young man; trimmed with radiance and promises he could never keep. Now, she was staring at him with a sentient eye. Wary, he said (with his lips too dry and his squirming kidneys; if only they could stop!):

"You're late. I thought my invitation was crystal clear about the hour? No trespassers shall tread the arena after the end of the show."

He had endorsed his doomesdayer face, with that thick accent he had accepted as his own. He arched his eyebrows prominently; because threatening was a convenient stopgap to the feeling of self-consumption in his bowels. She answered with a quip, as if the days have not interrupted their teasing.

"I'm far too old for childish stunts, Doctor. And you too! except for the sulking".

If their discourse was not trim, their lack of ease was so obvious: gaunty bodies and fussing eyes. Clara could not pass over a rifle of laugh: thanks god, that, at least, was a constant that would never be shattered down! She took the risk of stepping forward a little. She observed the eyes of the Doctor widen in surprise, as if he had a midnight encounter with the ghostly form of one of his plethora of wives - still scattered around the universe, still waiting for the ridiculous bridegroom that turned them down at the altar, or took to his heels with the silk veil.

Clara had no doubt of the women's tenacity, because that would be her altogether; the fight-response, the cursing, the broken glass. Not the waiting, though; otherwise, she would not have stood there, her feet refusing to take off; her hands strangely trembling; and sweat slyly sliding down all over her back. She remembered she had removed her coat before her grand entrance, and that the Doctor could have a glimpse of her emotion with an additional close-up on her cleavage. The mix-up was unlikely to please, but she had not turned out to assert her candy eye-ness, had she? 

"The reason for my return, Doctor..."

But she was stammering, and making a fool of herself. She re-asserted her voice; disregarded the lump in her throat; obdurately spearing the ice, blue eyes; trying to lock them up; trying to not giddily speak, when the Doctor – her Doctor? – suddenly quelled her voice by grabbing her right, rigid hand that was stubornelly hanging where it should be live up to her desires; therefore, knotting her fingers, the fickle facilities, born to nag her, to something, preferably bigger and tangible. Her hands, never complying with her when she ordered them to clutch (push on the button that would have killed Missy; make a stand for Danny when he decided to blow himself up; actually, turn off the damn telephone when he crossed the lethal street; dry up her tears when the blue box kicked in out of her life for what she believed the last time). 

Now, they had plenty of time to amend themselves. They could coil and recoil without the fear of being turned down or abandoned. They could stroke, out of will, the wrinkled face and the crooked smile. They could dovetail their anguish and their pleasure harmoniously, and fiercely cling to the warm-transpiring floor, as liquid as she felt at this very moment; when the Doctor risked to take up a whole cycle of shared evenings. The odds were against a toss-up, because they had tired out the doom from their lives: the dices were meant to fall on the heads, which meant that Clara was liable to touch the Doctor's hands. The night witnessed their delving deep into the foreign country from which they were in reality native. The day loomed over their shoulders in tight embrace and chafed their rest good-humouredly: another journey was in sight.


End file.
